Published

How SecurityScorecard Decreased No-Show Rates by 10%

As Director of Business Development at SecurityScorecard, Ronen Pessar’s job is directing the lead generation efforts with a team of 12 business development reps.

Ronen joined the team in 2017 and quickly learned that in order to succeed, he’d need to spend time creating a new language for companies to communicate and understand security. This would become the training for his team—and the communication over emails, calls, and LinkedIn inspired everyone’s interest in a solution.

His typical “ramp time” for training—before getting on the phone and attacking the market—starts with one full week in an educational classroom setting. Ronen walks through the product, the history, and the industry—all while training his reps in the industry. The training includes several self-paced training tools, followed by shadowing other reps to learn through experience how things should be done correctly and effectively.

During the second week, reps would typically be thrown into phone-based outreach where they would follow a pitching framework with the ultimate goal of helping reps to get comfortable with pitching while ultimately generating leads.

The primary way Ronen’s team interacted with prospects was through fielding inbound leads while starting outbound conversations.

SecurityScorecard had a strong marketing engine, so the low-hanging fruit for his team was in optimizing the inbound lead workflow.

When he joined SecurityScorecard, the primary reps attacked new hand-raiser leads through their lead queue in Salesforce, along with email notifications. Sometimes reps would respond to a lead fairly quickly, while other times it might be days before a follow-up was made.

He knew he needed a solution that was more proactive in nature and met reps within their existing workflow. In addition to email and their outreach tool, the other place reps spent the most time was Slack.

He had used Troops at a previous company and thought Troops might be a way to help his team move to a more real-time awareness and subsequent response on inbound reads.

Using Troops, they built a strategy that was capable of looking up a lead which would become a Salesforce lead and then Troops would trigger a notification which would appear within their Slack channel tagging the appropriate BDR for quick follow-up.

After a month of measurement, they found that their lead response time decreased from 2 days, on average, to under 2 hours—which impacted the amount of pipeline they were able to generate from existing inbound interest.

No-Show Rates

This immediate win was exciting and sparked interest for Ronen and his team—making him wonder what other ways their company could benefit from Troops.

One challenge they were facing? About 18% of the discovery meetings they were setting were ultimately not showing up for meetings.

Think about that…every 5 meetings would flake! The AEs were frustrated because they were missing out on “at-bats”, and this was actually something that was affecting his team’s ability to hit their goals (and paychecks!).

Whenever there was a no-show, AEs would check a box in Salesforce and eventually this feedback would get back to the SDR through a report. This wasn’t necessarily easy for his team to be aware of, and by the time his BDRs would try to re-engage the prospect, a lot of the momentum would be lost.

Ronen saw another opportunity to move the dissemination of this information to a real-time interface like Slack.

So Ronen constructed a workflow: as soon as an AE indicated there was a no-show, his team would be immediately notified and prompted to begin calling the prospect to try and get the meeting back on the calendar.

By striking while the iron was hot, his team was able to get the majority of the prospects rescheduled on the calendar again—moving the no-show rate from the original 18% to consistently around 8%.

AEs were happy because they had more pipeline to hit their numbers, BDRs were more consistently seeing the fruits of their labor come to fruition—affecting attainment and their compensations, and perhaps most importantly, SecurityScorecard was in a better position to hit their goals due to the increased sales pipeline.

What can we take away from this story?

Sales and marketing is moving to a real-time pace. If you’re not engaging with prospects efficiently and proactively, you’re leaving money on the table. You must engage your team in a real-time interface, that works across devices, and is already within your team’s existing workflow.

If your team is already using Slack, then you should definitely check out Troops. You can get started by creating an account for free today!